I wasn’t at play long before I lost one of my men to a gap between the stairs and the door. It was a red alien guy, and although he wasn’t my favorite, I still cared. Looking behind the steps, my knees were wet when I knelt in the snow, and my hands were cold and muddy when I held myself up. The sun beamed on my neck, and a sliver of sunlight also shone behind the concrete steps, right at the perfect angle, and in the light I thought I saw my toy man. But when I reached for him I grabbed hold of something hard and round. I pulled it out.

It was a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. Wild. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.

“Mumma,” I said. “What is this?”

“David,” she said from inside the shed. “Can you wait? Please, honey.”

I said nothing, waited, and examined the jar. My hand was slightly red from either the hot glass sitting in the sun all afternoon or the cold snow I crawled on.

Mom came out of the shed, squinting in the light.

“What’s what, gwus?” she said. Little boy, she meant.

I held the jar to her and she took it. I watched her look at it, her head tilted and her brown eyes wide as the jar. And then she dropped it into the snow and mud and told me to pack up my toys. “No, no, never mind,” she said. “Leave the toys. Come on, let’s go inside.”

She got on the phone and called somebody, whose voice on the other end I could hear and it sounded familiar. “I’ll be by,” he said. “I can get there soon. Don’t touch it, and don’t let him touch anything.”

Mom hung up the phone and lit a cigarette.

We waited for a long while. Mom stayed quiet, and with no talk or toy men to occupy myself with, I tried to remember the move to our new home, which was not some faraway memory and was only a day back. But because of the fever, I remembered only fragments. Miles of highway, miles of pine trees. I remembered riding in the front seat of our white Toyota as I burned up. Mom had held her long Winston 100 up to the cracked car window, and at eighty miles per hour the passing air sucked the smoke out. “We left Paige,” I kept saying. “We left her, Mumma.” Mom took her eyes off the road and looked over at me. She held her hand to my sweaty forehead. “You poor thing,” she said. Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.